By the off-kilter logic of Saigon and Washington, unleashing enough technology and firepower to produce a ten-to-one kill ratio was a metric of success, but the televised carnage of 1968, in which 16,592 Americans died, was too much for audiences back home.After Tet and Khe Sanh, the war was no longer America’s to win, only to avoid losing.

Ten percent of the munitions that rained down on the province failed to detonate, so there was the constant risk of stepping on a piece of unexploded ordnance, and many thousands did.They also had no idea of how dioxin, the lethal contaminant in Agent Orange, might blight their lives down through three generations.After putting down new roots in Hanoi, Searcy decided this would be his purpose in life: to address this legacy of destruction, or, as he puts it, “to build on the ashes and bones of war.” * * * The Tet offensive broke at the midpoint of Searcy’s year in Saigon.“Everything very bloody, everything shock them, life, death, and they cannot forget it.” Searcy himself first came to Khe Sanh in 1992, twenty-four years after Tet and twenty-four years after he shipped out of Vietnam at the end of a tour of duty with the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion in Saigon.He is a tall, lean man with a head of thick, gray-white hair and a courtly charm that seems entirely without effort or artifice.In January 1995, after returning for the third time, he moved to Hanoi, fell for the city’s magical blend of elegance and chaos, and has never left.